j* Movie Reviews 2019

Assassinaut (2019)

This film is a total waste of a great title.

Every once in a while a film comes out that has a ridiculously good title. And this title feels like a title that has just been waiting for happen forever. Assassins. Astronauts. This is a match made in heaven. The trailer looks a little bit budget, but workable.

But then the film just fails on all fronts. I mean it is visually pretty good. But plot, story, characters even, everything else is non-existent. It fails to deliver. There are super limited amounts of assassination. There is hardly anything that can be adequately described as astronauting.

You have these four teenagers who are being shot into space, and nobody seems to know why. The main character starts out dissecting frogs, but only because she can't afford cats. This endeared me to her initially. She wears red. All the teenagers have a colour code. Red, yellow, blue, green. They send them to space. Particularly, to some Presidential space station orbiting another planet. No-one ever knows why. Or why that's where the President is. And she's a pretty average President anyway.

They do have motorcycle helmets momentarily, but then they're never in space itself. First Earth, then a few minutes on the space station, then they're on the other planet. 5% vaguely spacey, 95% completely non-astronaut. Despite the promised bloodbaths, there's very little death. 3% vaguely killingish, 97% completely non-assassinish. The start of the movie is people repeatedly saying something along the lines of "won't somebody think of the children?" before the teens are shot into space. Nobody knows why they're going. Then the space station explodes and the rest of the movie is our colour-coded teens wandering the other planet that just looks like forested Earth.

The shots are really pretty, the lighting is great and there's some ambitious attempts at, well, low budget sci-fi. But the dialogue, for the most part sucks. The story isn't. The tension doesn't exist. There's a strange detour into alien-parasites, momentarily, and an even stranger detour into some kind of fleshy cave, return to womb style. I still have no idea what that was about. It seemed completely disconnected from everything else in the film. Like the makers went "sci-fi hell yeah!" and then this happened, suddenly and without warning, reasoning or actual entertainment value.

The acting is good, at the start particularly they do great work with buildings and architecture. Once it gets foresty it's not as pretty. The blue jumpsuit looks like it faded a lot during shooting.

Such a waste of such a great title. Disappointing.

J* gives it 1 star.